Now for a modern composition celebrating the joys of asbestos…not really. Amiandos (UNSOUNDS 75U) is the name of an asbestos mine in Cyprus, one that’s close to the heart and woven into the personal history of Yannis Kyriakides, that noted Greek composer with his many inventive and conceptually rich compositional ideas. His father was born in this part of the Troodos mountains, and his grandfather worked there.
For most of the 20th century this mine (and many others) produced asbestos in enormous amounts, until we found out how harmful is this mineral to the human frame. To realise his musical statement, Kyriakides worked with texts and voice samples, including music drawn from the Folkways music library and an extensive compilation put together by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation. And there are spoken words from written texts and newsreel clips too. None of this information quite prepares us for the strange mix of textures we hear, amounting to a very fragmented and impressionistic take on his theme. It’s also, not unreasonably, tinged with sadness – a hint of melancholic nostalgia for the past, and mourning the consequences of society’s dependence on this “beautiful and dangerous rock”. Beautiful? For sure – he has a little anecdote here about getting a box of the stones for his birthday, and how he was struck by “the splendour of the chrysotile rock”. The cover image carries that charge too – alien beauty in the forms, even as we know the menace of those death-dealing strands.
Best cut is the 15-minute ‘A Ghost Of Spring’, a kind of weird alien dream formed of short loops and patterns. Four archival photos complete the historical dimension of this unusual and touching statement. (28/02/2023)